Watch Dogs was originally released in 2014 and tells the story of a skilled hacker named Aiden Pearce in a near-future Chicago. 13 and only applies to the PC version of the game. There’s nothing worse than looking forward to a launch day and having that day arrive and having nothing to show for your $60 (or more, if you sprung for any of the special features).The original Watch Dogs is available for free for a limited time for those registered for Ubisoft’s Uplay service. It’s going to stress your servers, so be more than ready. My problem is this: everyone knew this was one of the most hotly anticipated games of 2014, so be prepared for that. Kotaku also has a story up confirming it’s a problem that’s fairly widespread. Twitter has countless accounts of the pain of server errors and Watch Dogs/Ubisoft have acknowledged the problem and are said to be working on a solution. But I couldn’t redownload because, of course, the servers are down. I’m currently further away from my goal than ever, since I uninstalled Uplay entirely based on the advice from the Ubisoft support Twitter account, which advised reinstalling. So I tried the Ubisoft Uplay support forums – and encountered a connection error. So I tried again – and encountered a connection error. So I downloaded that – and it promptly crashed upon first launch with an “Unrecoverable” error.

And I got one, but for Uplay, not for Watch Dogs. So I managed to sign up for a Uplay account and complete the transaction, at which point I expected a download link. I had to go to the official Ubisoft site originally, and figure out that Uplay is in fact Ubisoft’s digital storefront, and then there still wasn’t any clear indicator it would be digital delivery, except for the fact that they didn’t ask for a shipping address. That took more than simple Googling, surprisingly. First I had to figure out how to buy Watch Dogs digitally for PC. The problems started as soon as I made that decision.

But I was looking at graphics comparisons of Watch Dogs on Xbox One and on PC and I thought “what the heck, let’s try it.” I have an extremely capable gaming PC that’s pretty much neglected after all, and it’s in close proximity to my workstation (of course I’d only ever play at lunch, kind bosses). I’ve been good – I haven’t bought one in a while, since Just Cause 2 probably. Today I made a mistake: I bought a PC game.

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